a good place to sit

All too often in Mali there are occasions when I ask myself "why can't things just be EASY?!"  Things that wouldn't require a second thought back in the states can require extreme amounts of effort, time, money, and patience here.  One example is the saga of our couches.

After we got married we moved into an empty house and we were able to buy things to fill it thanks to wedding gift money and being able to buy some used furniture from someone who was emptying out a house.  I am still so thankful this provision and we went from a very empty house to one full of furniture!  We spent the first 6 weeks sitting on either plastic patio-type chairs or wooden kitchen table chairs once those were build by a carpenter.  But there wasn't living room furniture to be found in the small town we were in, so we bought a couch set in the big city Bamako (7 hours away) and waited a bit longer for someone with a truck to be able to haul it to us.  We were so happy to have real couches when we finally got them!  Couch sets are usually a big couch (3 place) a small couch (2 place) and 2 chairs.  You can see part of the set we got 3+ years ago in this picture:

As you can see, it was made of these hollow bamboo-type sticks and the fabric was tan with red flowers.  What you can't tell from looking is that the cushions were "cotton."  I put cotton in quotes because I don't know if you can honestly call the stuff inside the cushions cotton.  I guess its the waste that is left over when cotton gets processed.  Like bits of white cotton but mostly what looks like pieces and specks of tree bark and seeds and really dirty cottony stuff.  Oh, and don't forget the bugs.  Those aren't supposed to be included, but it seems we got them as a bonus.  When you sat on these couches they were hard.  Not fluffy like a cotton ball, but hard like sitting on the ground, only better than actually sitting on the ground because it was elevated and had something to lean against.  Several months after getting this couch set the bugs started to bore their way out of the bamboo and other bugs came out of the cotton.  Or maybe it was the same bugs in both, but either way the couches were buggy.  We tried a number of things: setting the couches in the hot sun for an afternoon to cook the bugs out, bug spray, coating the wood with many coats of varnish... but nothing helped.  We lived with the buggy couches until we were ready to move to Bamako, and then decided to give them away instead of move them with us.

When we got to Bamako we didn't have couches in our apartment for the first several weeks.  Then just before Christmas we bought a set.  This set was being made and sold on the side of the road like the first set, but there are no hollow bamboo sticks for bugs to hide in. You can see this set in the pictures below, but they didn't look like this when we got them.  They came with foam cushions (yay, not "cotton!") but it was the cheapest possible foam and was covered in a sort of scratchy polyester material - not nice fabric for sitting on in 90 - 100 degree weather.  We knew we'd have to replace the cushions, but we used them and let them get good and worn out over the past year.  And then this year our Christmas present (using money we got from parents) was to redo our living room.  


Jean-Patrick had always wanted an area rug for the living room space.  We found a simple grey one at Orca, a store selling imported goods.  We don't have a vacuum, so the rug gets swept and once it looks dirty we can take it outside and wash it with a hose, soap, and scrub brush.  We chose the fabric that you see at EuroDecor, a store selling imported fabric.  It is cotton, so much nicer to touch and sit on.  I had to visit the company that makes and sells foam mattresses, Fofy.  I learned all about different options as far as foam density and thickness.  I wound up buying a big mattress and cutting it into pieces because the price for pre-cut pieces was much more than if I were to cut it myself.  Then I had to take the foam cushions and fabric by taxi to a tailor to have him sew the fabric into covers (with zippers so they can come off and be washed.) 

So a whole lot of taxi rides with decisions and shopping and spending money later, and finally we have a good place to sit.  The new cushions are of high quality foam and are way more comfortable to sit on than what we ever had before.  I am glad that this project is done, but... its kind of like that book "if you give a mouse a cookie,"  because of course now I keep looking at the curtains in the living room and thinking that I'd sure like to get new curtains to complete the new look.  (by new curtains I mean fabric to sew new curtains - nothing is quick and easy!)